ELEVEN

 

Jamie’s words echoed through the air, and Lance took a deep breath. He had known that he was potentially delving into some dangerous territory when he’d asked, but his curiosity hadn’t allowed him just to look away from what he’d noticed.

There was so much that hadn’t been said, so much that Lance could pick up, just by context. From the look of caution, even fear, that shone in the back of Jamie’s eyes sometimes. From the way he had been so surprised, and always was, to be treated decently.

Lance struggled. He wanted to say something to show that he understood. That he didn’t think it was Jamie’s fault because there was an ugly undertone of shame on his face. But he also knew, in a similar situation, the last thing he’d want was pity. There had been so much of that when Amy …

And then he got it. It was the right thing to do, he felt it on a purely instinctive level, and he couldn’t say that it wasn’t a little scary to open himself up, but after what Jamie had just told him, he figured he could put himself out there a little, too. He just started talking, throwing himself into Jamie’s arms and having to trust that Jamie would catch him.

“There was this girl. Amy. I was dating her for two years.” Lance didn’t talk about this stuff, and the words came out very slowly, reluctantly, only drawn from him by the openness which Jamie had shown him. “And we were pretty close. I thought we’d get married someday.”

Without having to say it, he somehow hoped that Jamie knew what he meant. This was a woman who had been very important to him, but she, well, she wasn’t around now. Jamie’s nod and his silence seemed to acknowledge that.

“She just … disappeared one day. I asked her to move in with me, and she said yes. I was looking through engagement rings. Her parents loved me, and mine loved her. Everyone just assumed …”

Lance’s voice choked off, though, and he took a deep breath, letting it calm him, soothe him, before he kept going.

“What do you mean, disappeared? She left?” Jamie’s question was innocent enough, but Lance had to grit his teeth to keep himself from saying the first thing that came to mind. Snapping at this man wasn’t going to do anything.

“She wouldn’t just leave. She … I think she might have died,” Lance admitted. “That’s part of why I joined the band, to make enough money to hire a PI. But they didn’t find anything. She was just …”

Saying the words out loud, the words which had taken him so long to accept, they made it utterly impossible for him to speak at all. He looked at Jamie, who gazed back at him, a sort of solemnity on his face that Lance just plain wasn’t used to seeing there.

It was a relief to see, though. Jamie was taking this seriously. When they’d met, Lance wouldn’t have bet that the guy could take anything seriously, but obviously, he was.

Their words, their stories, hung in the air between them. Secrets, ghosts of the past, neither of them fully over it. But for the first time, Lance felt like he might be getting there. Like maybe that wound had been healing while he hadn’t been paying attention, and one of the last steps had just been taken.

Lance didn’t know what to say. It seemed that Jamie didn’t, either. So they just smiled at each other, a bit awkward, maybe neither of them knowing exactly how to deal with the exchange of highly emotional stuff that had gone between them just then.

Lance shifted off of Jamie, and finally took the condom off and tossed it away. Without comment, he wrapped his arms around Jamie and encouraged him to come close, smiling with pleasure as the other man rested his head on his chest.

Something had happened between them. Lance knew it, and he was willing to put real money on Jamie knowing it, too. A connection had been formed, and Lance wouldn’t say it out loud, but he was seriously starting to doubt that this was nothing more than sex, that it could ever go back to that, with what they knew about each other.

And the really crazy thing, to him, was that he didn’t even mind the idea. For the first time since he’d lost Amy, he felt like maybe, he was ready for this. Sure, there were obstacles in the way, but they had kept things quiet so far.

Someday, Lester would chill about the whole thing with Ken. And it even occurred to Lance that maybe Lester would go for a thing with him and Jamie. They were members of the same band, and they were both males. They would be every bit as good for their publicity as Lance and Ken were.

Maybe better, because while Ken was Lance’s friend and always would be, the way that he was coming to feel about Jamie was far more in line with what a romantic relationship should be. It would be far more convincing.

In just a month or so, Lance decided right then and there that he would approach Lester and tell him that the thing with Ken wasn’t working. That would give him that few weeks to explore this thing with Jamie, to see if it could be something that could build into something real.

He fell asleep right then and there, a smile on his face, having figured everything out quite nicely, he figured. But when he woke up in the morning, Jamie was not in bed with him anymore.

 

* * *

 

It was pretty late in the morning, Lance realized, by the angle of the sunlight which came slanting in golden beams through the window. No one had woken him up, which meant that they might be in some trouble. It meant the bus might not be fixed.

Well, they still had almost twenty-four hours to get to Portland. It was totally possible, and anyway, it wasn’t his problem. This was an unscheduled break, and he stretched out his body and then rose to his feet, grabbing a robe.

He’d go find Jamie, he figured. Talk to him about what he’d realized before he’d passed out the night before. Maybe put a name to what was going on between them, which was certainly more than just sex. Or maybe not. It might be just fine without being totally defined.

When he came out of his bedroom, though, Jamie wasn’t who he saw. It was just Aaron, who glanced up from his phone to nod briefly in greeting and then turned his eyes back to the glowing screen. Over his shoulder, Lance briefly saw that the other man was on a news website, and he smirked, amused.

Aaron seemed to take everything so damn seriously. But his smirk turned into a frown as he thought about it more because it seemed to him that Aaron would never be stupid enough to get himself into this situation in the first place. Aaron kept to himself, and that probably made him smarter than Lance.

Sighing softly, Lance flopped down onto the armchair, gazing at nothing in particular. It took him awhile to realize that his eyes were on Aaron, who was looking at him right back, a deeply thoughtful look on his face.

“What’s up?”

Aaron asked the words, just as Lance was bracing himself for Aaron to freak out at him. The man was not the most approachable, friendly person in the world, and Lance had been staring at him. He hadn’t meant to, but it had happened anyway. His mind had been far away, but Aaron could be prickly.

Like Jamie. Jamie could be prickly, too, though he did it with sarcastic comments more than with sullen silences, like Aaron did. But it occurred to Lance, for the first time, that maybe there was more than reticence at play here. Maybe Aaron protected himself, just as Lance had come to see that Jamie did.

“Oh. Uh.” Lance considered that. There were limits to what he could even tell Aaron, who wasn’t in on the secret about the fake relationship between Ken and Lance. Aaron was being fed the same story as the rest of the world, and Lance sighed as he tried to figure out what he could say to his surprisingly perceptive bandmate.

“Is this about Ken?” Aaron actually turned the screen of his phone off and looked at Lance directly, which was definitely not something that Lance was used to. He’d known Aaron for over a year, and now that he thought about it, he was pretty sure this was his first real conversation with the guy.

“ … Sort of,” Lance admitted. “It’s sort of complicated …”

“Because you’re not really dating him,” Aaron spoke with a tone of certainty. He wasn’t asking a question, he was just stating a fact, and Lance bit his lower lip and dropped his gaze. Just for a moment, a knee-jerk guilty reaction. How the hell did Aaron know that?

“Lance, I’m not an idiot. I have eyes,” Aaron spoke again, and when Lance stole a look at him, he saw something that he would never have expected to see from the other man. Compassion. Not pity, but just sincere worry.

“Where’s Ken?” Lance asked because if they were going to get into this, he really didn’t need Ken walking in in the middle. Ken, who would surely report back to Lester that Lance wasn’t keeping his side of the deal. Things might still work out, but only if handled carefully.

“He went running,” Aaron told him, and Lance nodded. Silently, he rose to his feet and went to the coffee maker, not because he really wanted coffee but because he wanted an excuse to focus on something other than Aaron’s eyes, which seemed to know far too much.

“No. I guess you figured it out, but Ken and I aren’t really dating …” Lance started to speak, and as he did, the whole story came out. Every last bit of it, from the embarrassment of being caught on dates with women, women he didn’t even care about, and his agreement with Ken and Lester.

He even went into Ken’s irrational dislike of Jamie, how Ken wasn’t even willing to give the newcomer a chance. Though he felt intensely disloyal to his best friend, he said it all and took comfort in the fact that Aaron was a quiet man. If anyone could keep a secret, surely it was Aaron.

“And then there’s Jamie,” Aaron prompted, and Lance winced, but somehow it didn’t even surprise him that Aaron knew, or suspected, about that, too. In fact, he was starting to wonder what those odd violet eyes of his didn’t see.

“And then there’s Jamie,” Lance echoed, not bothering to deny it. Aaron had already figured it out, at least partially. There didn’t seem to be any point in trying to pretend that it wasn’t going on, not when Aaron already knew.

Only it was hard to know what to even say about Jamie. There were feelings, for sure, but how far did they go? Even he was just figuring that out. How could he explain it to anyone else?

Aaron just waited, his head cocked slightly to the side, a look of pure concentration on his face. It was strange, being the subject of Aaron’s attention. He’d noticed it before, how Aaron fixated completely on whatever he was doing, to a level that was almost terrifying, but he’d never had that turned on him before.

“I think I …” Lance frowned and shook his head. He wasn’t ready for that, so he turned onto a different track. “I think we’re together. It was just supposed to be sex, but it’s turned into more than that.”

Aaron nodded, his mouth relaxed, like he wasn’t exactly surprised by that, his expression thoughtful.

“I’ve seen it,” Aaron admitted. “He cares for you, and you for him. You’re just lucky Ken isn’t the most observant person, and Lester isn’t around much.”

“I don’t know if I should go for it,” Lance admitted in a soft whisper. “I think I could. I think that, further into the tour, if I went to Lester he would let me and Ken stage some sort of elaborate breakup. I don’t think he would care if I’m seen to be dating Ken or Jamie, as long as …”

His voice trailed off, and he shook his head. Aaron didn’t know about Amy. Aaron didn’t, couldn’t, understand just how damn terrifying this was to him. That he could let himself fall for Jamie, and then potentially lose him, no one could understand that.

“Well, what do you have to lose by trying?” Aaron asked, and just those few words, that one sentence, slapped things into focus for Lance quite a bit.

What did he have to lose? His peace of mind. The band. There was quite a lot, but what Aaron didn’t ask, which was perhaps more relevant, was what did Lance stand to gain if he went for this?

A small smile tugged at the corners of his mouth, a strange, reckless, but somehow very right feeling forming, growing, in the very core of his body. What did he have to lose? Plenty. What did he have to gain?

So much more, if it worked out and if Jamie was willing to go for it, if Lance could open himself up, and for the first time since Amy, Lance thought that was actually a possibility.

He opened his mouth but didn’t get the chance to say anything. The door to the suite opened, and Lance looked up, expecting to see Ken. He shot Aaron a brief, warning look, but the really good thing about Aaron was that Lance didn’t feel like he actually needed to warn him to keep his mouth shut. Keeping his mouth shut seemed to be pretty much Aaron’s natural state.

But it wasn’t Ken who walked in. It was Jamie, and his cheeks were pink, his eyes sparkling, a smug, highly pleased with himself, smirk on his lips as he held something behind his back.

“Hey,” Jamie said, the very soul of casualness, to the point where it was highly suspicious. Lance eyed him, trying to see whatever he was holding behind his back, because whatever it was, Jamie was doing his best to keep it from Lance.

“Jamie,” Lance finally said, frustrated by how Jamie kept shifting, kept Lance’s eyes from falling on what he was holding. All Lance saw was the corner of what looked like a cloth bag, maybe? And a little bit of mesh, he thought, but Jamie was being a brat, and he couldn’t see more.

“Jamie!” Aaron spoke sharply, and Jamie jumped, obviously startled. “Knock it off. You’re being a twit.”

Giving a sheepish little grin, Jamie shrugged and then slowly, with great pomp and drama, pulled what appeared to be a small cloth duffel bag from behind his back.

“I don’t see what …” Lance started, a little annoyed because why Jamie had made such a big deal about a stupid new piece of luggage, he didn’t know. And then he gasped, and his eyes went wide. “No. No, Jamie, you didn’t.”

But Jamie had. As the beautiful auburn haired man held up the bag, Lance caught the slightest hint of glowing silvery eyes and a soft, low mewing noise. He raised his gaze back to Jamie, who stared at him, seemingly confident but with uncertainty in his eyes.